Quotes from John D. Lantos

Surgery is the most masculine of medical disciplines, taking knives and penetrating the body to find disease and destroy it. It is a war game in which cold and shiny stainless steel is pitted against the unseen, sinister but discoverable and conquerable enemy. Pediatrics is in many ways the most feminine of medical disciplines, with its focus on small children, preventive care, nurturing. In terms of gender, neonatology seems to be somewhere in between.

Because the work that doctors do has moral urgency, doctors have a highly refined, professionally reinforced sense of right and wrong.

A whole hospital ward seemed to be crossdressing, nurses pretending to be mothers playing like boys with Tinkertoy babies.

Informed consent is probably the most revolutionary, the most rudimentary, the most misunderstood and misused term in all of health law and bioethics.

Many NICU survivors have hospital bills of more than a million dollars and cannot be discharged from the hospital because their parents cannot afford a telephone at home.

From the individual doctor's perspective, it is far better to do whatever it takes to avoid litigation, even if it doesn't seem to be the right thing to do, than to risk entanglement in this crazy system.

there is something unforgettably compelling about having actually been there, alone, at two in the morning, gloved, masked, and robed like a latex-covered priest, receiving into my hands a blue, bloody, and lifeless baby and having to decide.